". . . [T]he book offers an in-depth study of the vast variety of narratives, voices, and performative acts connected to the Belomor project understood as a venture to transform both nature and prisoners. Most interestingly Draskoczy offers a fresh view on camp experience in the early 1930s, leaving the conventional narrative of political prisoners aside in favor of the perspective of criminals, who most of the time constituted the main group within Gulag society and at whom the concept of perekovka was initially aimed."